About this blog

Within this blog, the experts of crealytics – Europe's fastest growing PPC technology company – provide commercial decision makers with important PPC tools as to monitoring and performance as well as support them in taking the right decisions for their department. Regarding PPC managers, this blog provides useful insights which can be gainfully used in the daily PPC business.

Search, Analytics & Social Conference (look out for the unicorn keyword!)

Last week I attended SAScon, a Search, Analytics and Social Media conference taking place for the 7th time and attracting over 350 digital marketing professionals (mainly senior). My aim was to get some insight into the relationship between PPC and SEO in the future and how it will be influenced by the technological innovations.

Topics covered:

Creativity and data in different channels

Creative retargeting

Social commerce

Success measurement with alternative metrics

Most interesting speaker:

Jim Banks from Groove – talked about how PPC has evolved since its beginning, gave examples of best practices and highlighted what the focus should be in the future; including cross device tracking, the growth of Bing, social and virtual reality.

Banks also spoke about finding the “unicorn” keyword – that keyword that no one else has found, but which can become the most profitable one. He used an example relating to the increased interest in credit ratings seen online a few years ago. The unicorn keyword was “teletrack” – a large volume of users were searching for it, but hardly any advertisers thought to bid on it. It cost only 10cent. Banks said that he built his summer house off the back of this keyword.

Top takeaways:

With Mobile continuing to grow (5.5 billion users predicted by 2020), there is increased interest in voice search. As such, the focus should be on long tail keywords – on predicting what users would ask search engines. Also, marketing efforts should be adapted to ongoing technological innovations such as virtual reality and augmented reality, which will influence customers’ online behaviour.

Invest more in Bing and don’t just import duplications of your Google campaigns. In particular Bing Shopping Ads are growing in popularity due to the adoption of Windows 10, so there is increasing opportunity here.

Was it worth the ticket?

From my point of view, the conference had a great mixture of search, analytics and social related talks. It was interesting to hear best practices for different channels from digital marketing experts, as well as to gain insights on what the future will bring and how the industry will be affected.